OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
WikiChurches: A Fine-Grained Dataset of Architectural Styles with Real-World Challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

We introduce a novel dataset for architectural style classification, consisting of 9,485 images of church buildings. Both images and style labels were sourced from Wikipedia. The dataset can serve as a benchmark for various research fields, as it combines numerous real-world challenges: fine-grained distinctions between classes based on subtle visual features, a comparatively small sample size, a highly imbalanced class distribution, a high variance of viewpoints, and a hierarchical organization of labels, where only some images are labeled at the most precise level. In addition, we provide 631 bounding box annotations of characteristic visual features for 139 churches from four major categories. These annotations can, for example, be useful for research on fine-grained classification, where additional expert knowledge about distinctive object parts is often available. Images and annotations are available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5166987
Channel Knowledge Map for Environment-Aware Communications: EM Algorithm for Map Construction
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Channel knowledge map (CKM) is an emerging technique to enable environment-aware wireless communications, in which databases with location-specific channel knowledge are used to facilitate or even obviate real-time channel state information acquisition. One fundamental problem for CKM-enabled communication is how to efficiently construct the CKM based on finite measurement data points at limited user locations. Towards this end, this paper proposes a novel map construction method based on the \emph{expectation maximization} (EM) algorithm, by utilizing the available measurement data, jointly with the expert knowledge of well-established statistic channel models. The key idea is to partition the available data points into different groups, where each group shares the same modelling parameter values to be determined. We show that determining the modelling parameter values can be formulated as a maximum likelihood estimation problem with latent variables, which is then efficiently solved by the classic EM algorithm. Compared to the pure data-driven methods such as the nearest neighbor based interpolation, the proposed method is more efficient since only a small number of modelling parameters need to be determined and stored. Furthermore, the proposed method is extended for constructing a specific type of CKM, namely, the channel gain map (CGM), where closed-form expressions are derived for the E-step and M-step of the EM algorithm. Numerical results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed map construction method as compared to the benchmark curve fitting method with one single model.
Evolutionary Algorithms in Approximate Computing: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2021
Year: 2021

In recent years, many design automation methods have been developed to routinely create approximate implementations of circuits and programs that show excellent trade-offs between the quality of output and required resources. This paper deals with evolutionary approximation as one of the popular approximation methods. The paper provides the first survey of evolutionary algorithm (EA)-based approaches applied in the context of approximate computing. The survey reveals that EAs are primarily applied as multi-objective optimizers. We propose to divide these approaches into two main classes: (i) parameter optimization in which the EA optimizes a vector of system parameters, and (ii) synthesis and optimization in which EA is responsible for determining the architecture and parameters of the resulting system. The evolutionary approximation has been applied at all levels of design abstraction and in many different applications. The neural architecture search enabling the automated hardware-aware design of approximate deep neural networks was identified as a newly emerging topic in this area.
An Effective Non-Autoregressive Model for Spoken Language Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU), a core component of the task-oriented dialogue system, expects a shorter inference latency due to the impatience of humans. Non-autoregressive SLU models clearly increase the inference speed but suffer uncoordinated-slot problems caused by the lack of sequential dependency information among each slot chunk. To gap this shortcoming, in this paper, we propose a novel non-autoregressive SLU model named Layered-Refine Transformer, which contains a Slot Label Generation (SLG) task and a Layered Refine Mechanism (LRM). SLG is defined as generating the next slot label with the token sequence and generated slot labels. With SLG, the non-autoregressive model can efficiently obtain dependency information during training and spend no extra time in inference. LRM predicts the preliminary SLU results from Transformer's middle states and utilizes them to guide the final prediction. Experiments on two public datasets indicate that our model significantly improves SLU performance (1.5\% on Overall accuracy) while substantially speed up (more than 10 times) the inference process over the state-of-the-art baseline.
Flying Guide Dog: Walkable Path Discovery for the Visually Impaired Utilizing Drones and Transformer-based Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Lacking the ability to sense ambient environments effectively, blind and visually impaired people (BVIP) face difficulty in walking outdoors, especially in urban areas. Therefore, tools for assisting BVIP are of great importance. In this paper, we propose a novel "flying guide dog" prototype for BVIP assistance using drone and street view semantic segmentation. Based on the walkable areas extracted from the segmentation prediction, the drone can adjust its movement automatically and thus lead the user to walk along the walkable path. By recognizing the color of pedestrian traffic lights, our prototype can help the user to cross a street safely. Furthermore, we introduce a new dataset named Pedestrian and Vehicle Traffic Lights (PVTL), which is dedicated to traffic light recognition. The result of our user study in real-world scenarios shows that our prototype is effective and easy to use, providing new insight into BVIP assistance.
Research on Brick Schema Representation for Building Operation with Variable Refrigerant Flow Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.OH 2021
Year: 2021

Building metadata is regarded as the signpost in organizing massive building data. The application of building metadata simplifies the creation of digital representations and provides portable data analytics. Typical metadata standards such as Brick and Haystack are used to describe the data of the building system. Brick uses standard ontologies to create building metadata. However, neither Haystack nor Brick has provided definitions about the Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) system so far. For years, both Brick and Haystack working groups have been discussing how to describe VRF in their schema, mainly about the classification of VRF and the definitions of VRF units. There were no settled solutions for these problems. Meanwhile, the global VRF market is growing increasingly fast because of the energy efficiency and installation simplicity of the VRF system. It is needed to have the metadata to describe VRF units in buildings for data analysis and management. Addressing this challenge, this paper extended Brick Schema with the VRF module and verified the Brick VRF module. Then, the model and the service framework were developed and applied for a building in China. The framework can serve portable energy analysis for different areas. The VRF module of this paper provides a possible solution for the expression of the VRF system in the building semantic web. The works in this paper will support semantic web in automation strategies for building management and scalable building operation.
Effects of Hints on Debugging Scratch Programs: An Empirical Study with Primary School Teachers in Training
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Bugs in learners' programs are often the result of fundamental misconceptions. Teachers frequently face the challenge of first having to understand such bugs, and then suggest ways to fix them. In order to enable teachers to do so effectively and efficiently, it is desirable to support them in recognising and fixing bugs. Misconceptions often lead to recurring patterns of similar bugs, enabling automated tools to provide this support in terms of hints on occurrences of common bug patterns. In this paper, we investigate to what extent the hints improve the effectiveness and efficiency of teachers in debugging learners' programs using a cohort of 163 primary school teachers in training, tasked to correct buggy Scratch programs, with and without hints on bug patterns. Our experiment suggests that automatically generated hints can reduce the effort of finding and fixing bugs from 8.66 to 5.24 minutes, while increasing the effectiveness by 34% more correct solutions. While this improvement is convincing, arguably teachers in training might first need to learn debugging "the hard way" to not miss the opportunity to learn by relying on tools. We therefore investigate whether the use of hints during training affects their ability to recognise and fix bugs without hints. Our experiment provides no significant evidence that either learning to debug with hints or learning to debug "the hard way" leads to better learning effects. Overall, this suggests that bug patterns might be a useful concept to include in the curriculum for teachers in training, while tool-support to recognise these patterns is desirable for teachers in practice.
ROSITA: Enhancing Vision-and-Language Semantic Alignments via Cross- and Intra-modal Knowledge Integration
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Vision-and-language pretraining (VLP) aims to learn generic multimodal representations from massive image-text pairs. While various successful attempts have been proposed, learning fine-grained semantic alignments between image-text pairs plays a key role in their approaches. Nevertheless, most existing VLP approaches have not fully utilized the intrinsic knowledge within the image-text pairs, which limits the effectiveness of the learned alignments and further restricts the performance of their models. To this end, we introduce a new VLP method called ROSITA, which integrates the cross- and intra-modal knowledge in a unified scene graph to enhance the semantic alignments. Specifically, we introduce a novel structural knowledge masking (SKM) strategy to use the scene graph structure as a priori to perform masked language (region) modeling, which enhances the semantic alignments by eliminating the interference information within and across modalities. Extensive ablation studies and comprehensive analysis verifies the effectiveness of ROSITA in semantic alignments. Pretrained with both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets, ROSITA significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art VLP methods on three typical vision-and-language tasks over six benchmark datasets.
Systematic Generation of Conformance Tests for JavaScript
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

JavaScript implementations are tested for conformance to the ECMAScript standard using a large hand-written test suite. Not only in this a tedious approach, it also relies solely on the natural language specification for differentiating behaviors, while hidden implementation details can also affect behavior and introduce divergences. We propose to generate conformance tests through dynamic symbolic execution of polyfills, drop-in replacements for newer JavaScript language features that are not yet widely supported. We then run these generated tests against multiple implementations of JavaScript, using a majority vote to identify the correct behavior. To facilitate test generation for polyfill code, we introduce a model for structured symbolic inputs that is suited to the dynamic nature of JavaScript. In our evaluation, we found 17 divergences in the widely used core-js polyfill and were able to increase branch coverage in interpreter code by up to 15%. Because polyfills are typically written even before standardization, our approach will allow to maintain and extend standardization test suites with reduced effort.
Routing in Delay-Tolerant Networks under Uncertain Contact Plans
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2021
Year: 2021

Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTN) enable store-carry-and-forward data transmission in networks challenged by frequent disruptions and high latency. Existing classification distinguishes between scheduled and probabilistic DTNs, for which specific routing solutions have been developed. In this paper, we uncover a gap in-between where uncertain contact plans can be exploited to enhance data delivery in many practical scenarios described by probabilistic schedules available a priori. Routing under uncertain contact plans (RUCoP) is next formulated as a multiple-copy Markov Decision Process and then exported to local-knowledge (L-RUCoP) and Contact Graph Routing extensions (CGR-UCoP) which can be implemented in the existing DTN protocol stack. RUCoP and its derivations are evaluated in a first extensive simulation benchmark for DTNs under uncertain contact plans comprising both random and realistic scenarios. Results confirm that RUCoP and L-RUCoP closely approach the ideal delivery ratio of an oracle, while CGR-UCoP improves state-of-the-art DTN routing schemes delivery ratio up to 25%.
Improving Readability of Scratch Programs with Search-based Refactoring
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Block-based programming languages like Scratch have become increasingly popular as introductory languages for novices. These languages are intended to be used with a "tinkering" approach which allows learners and teachers to quickly assemble working programs and games, but this often leads to low code quality. Such code can be hard to comprehend, changing it is error-prone, and learners may struggle and lose interest. The general solution to improve code quality is to refactor the code. However, Scratch lacks many of the common abstraction mechanisms used when refactoring programs written in higher programming languages. In order to improve Scratch code, we therefore propose a set of atomic code transformations to optimise readability by (1) rewriting control structures and (2) simplifying scripts using the inherently concurrent nature of Scratch programs. By automating these transformations it is possible to explore the space of possible variations of Scratch programs. In this paper, we describe a multi-objective search-based approach that determines sequences of code transformations which improve the readability of a given Scratch program and therefore form refactorings. Evaluation on a random sample of 1000 Scratch programs demonstrates that the generated refactorings reduce complexity and entropy in 70.4% of the cases, and 354 projects are improved in at least one metric without making any other metric worse. The refactored programs can help both novices and their teachers to improve their code.
NIST SRE CTS Superset: A large-scale dataset for telephony speaker recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2021
Year: 2021

This document provides a brief description of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) speaker recognition evaluation (SRE) conversational telephone speech (CTS) Superset. The CTS Superset has been created in an attempt to provide the research community with a large-scale dataset along with uniform metadata that can be used to effectively train and develop telephony (narrowband) speaker recognition systems. It contains a large number of telephony speech segments from more than 6800 speakers with speech durations distributed uniformly in the [10s, 60s] range. The segments have been extracted from the source corpora used to compile prior SRE datasets (SRE1996-2012), including the Greybeard corpus as well as the Switchboard and Mixer series collected by the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). In addition to the brief description, we also report speaker recognition results on the NIST 2020 CTS Speaker Recognition Challenge, obtained using a system trained with the CTS Superset. The results will serve as a reference baseline for the challenge.
Semi-Supervised Siamese Network for Identifying Bad Data in Medical Imaging Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Noisy data present in medical imaging datasets can often aid the development of robust models that are equipped to handle real-world data. However, if the bad data contains insufficient anatomical information, it can have a severe negative effect on the model's performance. We propose a novel methodology using a semi-supervised Siamese network to identify bad data. This method requires only a small pool of 'reference' medical images to be reviewed by a non-expert human to ensure the major anatomical structures are present in the Field of View. The model trains on this reference set and identifies bad data by using the Siamese network to compute the distance between the reference set and all other medical images in the dataset. This methodology achieves an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.989 for identifying bad data. Code will be available at https://git.io/JYFuV.
A Physics Informed Neural Network Approach to Solution and Identification of Biharmonic Equations of Elasticity
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We explore an application of the Physics Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) in conjunction with Airy stress functions and Fourier series to find optimal solutions to a few reference biharmonic problems of elasticity and elastic plate theory. Biharmonic relations are fourth-order partial differential equations (PDEs) that are challenging to solve using classical numerical methods, and have not been addressed using PINNs. Our work highlights a novel application of classical analytical methods to guide the construction of efficient neural networks with the minimal number of parameters that are very accurate and fast to evaluate. In particular, we find that enriching feature space using Airy stress functions can significantly improve the accuracy of PINN solutions for biharmonic PDEs.
Peak Sidelobe Level and Peak Crosscorrelation of Golay-Rudin-Shapiro Sequences
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Sequences with low aperiodic autocorrelation and crosscorrelation are used in communications and remote sensing. Golay and Shapiro independently devised a recursive construction that produces families of complementary pairs of binary sequences. In the simplest case, the construction produces the Rudin-Shapiro sequences, and in general it produces what we call Golay-Rudin-Shapiro sequences. Calculations by Littlewood show that the Rudin-Shapiro sequences have low mean square autocorrelation. A sequence's peak sidelobe level is its largest magnitude of autocorrelation over all nonzero shifts. Høholdt, Jensen, and Justesen showed that there is some undetermined positive constant $A$ such that the peak sidelobe level of a Rudin-Shapiro sequence of length $2^n$ is bounded above by $A(1.842626\ldots)^n$, where $1.842626\ldots$ is the positive real root of $X^4-3 X-6$. We show that the peak sidelobe level is bounded above by $5(1.658967\ldots)^{n-4}$, where $1.658967\ldots$ is the real root of $X^3+X^2-2 X-4$. Any exponential bound with lower base will fail to be true for almost all $n$, and any bound with the same base but a lower constant prefactor will fail to be true for at least one $n$. We provide a similar bound on the peak crosscorrelation (largest magnitude of crosscorrelation over all shifts) between the sequences in each Rudin-Shapiro pair. The methods that we use generalize to all families of complementary pairs produced by the Golay-Rudin-Shapiro recursion, for which we obtain bounds on the peak sidelobe level and peak crosscorrelation with the same exponential growth rate as we obtain for the original Rudin-Shapiro sequences.
An Efficient Parallel Algorithm for finding Bridges in a Dense Graph
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a simple and efficient approach for finding the bridges and failure points in a densely connected network mapped as a graph. The algorithm presented here is a parallel algorithm which works in a distributed environment. The main idea of our algorithm is to generate a sparse certificate for a graph and finds bridges using a simple DFS (Depth First Search). We first decompose the graph into independent and minimal subgraphs using a minimum spanning forest algorithm. To identify the bridges in the graph network, we convert these subgraphs into a single compressed graph and use a DFS approach to find bridges. The approach presented here is optimized for the use cases of dense graphs and gives the time complexity of O(E/M + Vlog(M)), for a given graph G(V,E) running on M machines.
Requirements-Aided Automatic Test Case Generation for Industrial Cyber-physical Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

Industrial cyber-physical systems require complex distributed software to orchestrate many heterogeneous mechatronic components and control multiple physical processes. Industrial automation software is typically developed in a model-driven fashion where abstractions of physical processes called plant models are co-developed and iteratively refined along with the control code. Testing such multi-dimensional systems is extremely difficult because often models might not be accurate, do not correspond accurately with subsequent refinements, and the software must eventually be tested on the real plant, especially in safety-critical systems like nuclear plants. This paper proposes a framework wherein high-level functional requirements are used to automatically generate test cases for designs at all abstraction levels in the model-driven engineering process. Requirements are initially specified in natural language and then analyzed and specified using a formalized ontology. The requirements ontology is then refined along with controller and plant models during design and development stages such that test cases can be generated automatically at any stage. A representative industrial water process system case study illustrates the strengths of the proposed formalism. The requirements meta-model proposed by the CESAR European project is used for requirements engineering while IEC 61131-3 and model-driven concepts are used in the design and development phases. A tool resulting from the proposed framework called REBATE (Requirements Based Automatic Testing Engine) is used to generate and execute test cases for increasingly concrete controller and plant models.
Aggregation Delayed Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Federated learning is a distributed machine learning paradigm where multiple data owners (clients) collaboratively train one machine learning model while keeping data on their own devices. The heterogeneity of client datasets is one of the most important challenges of federated learning algorithms. Studies have found performance reduction with standard federated algorithms, such as FedAvg, on non-IID data. Many existing works on handling non-IID data adopt the same aggregation framework as FedAvg and focus on improving model updates either on the server side or on clients. In this work, we tackle this challenge in a different view by introducing redistribution rounds that delay the aggregation. We perform experiments on multiple tasks and show that the proposed framework significantly improves the performance on non-IID data.